Guide: Getting LOD to Work

[Dave_91]

Before we begin, I recommend backing up your Textures-> LandscapeLOD-> Generated folder to another location. Also, back up your Meshes-> Landscape-> LOD folder. Then clear out all the files from these folders, so they're empty; the Generated folder in Textures in particular.

 

First things first. Save your .esp. Even if you are yet to even mod anything, save it. The CS doesn’t like it when you’re generating land to an unsaved .esp, if not, 90% of the time the CS WILL crash.

 

Secondly, don’t go wild in the heightmap editor, try and stay realistic. IMO, when raising land, don’t create areas above the red/orange colouring or it’ll go too high. However, if you do go above red and into yellow and intend to make a huge mountain, if it’s smoothed and blended into the surrounding landmass It should look fine.

 

To make your landmass appear eroded, the noise tool comes in really handy. I usually have the area turned right up so a lot of land is edited and cover all of the landscape in noise. Again don’t go nuts with this tool, it may look good, but you don’t want your land too bumpy and rigid. I usually give an area a few clicks of noise then move on. Afterwards, I use the smooth tool to clear any really bad bumpiness so that it appears smooth, but complex looking, with a ‘cloudy’ like effect.

 

When you’re happy with that, save it. Depending on the size of the landmass, this may take several minutes, but it’s usually a speedy procedure.

 

Here’s a screenshot of my heightmap:

 

Click

 

With that done, you’re ready for your LOD. At this point, I could go into regions and regional generation, but since this is based primarily on getting the LOD working without problems, we’ll just get right to the point.

 

Save your plug in. If you get errors about missing landscape TAKE NOTE OF THE CELLS, DO NOT click yes to all. If you do, you’ll give yourself a longer job than necessary. Now, usually these errors are because of geometry seems in between quads. Most of the time you’ll get these, they’re simple to fix though. The cells you’ve just taken note of, move to these cells and look for a small, but very deep hole leading right down or right up through your land (sometimes wire frame mode comes in handy here) and smooth those off. Save the file again. If you get errors still, take note and fix.

 

When that’s done, go into the height map editor and load up your worldspace. We’re going to create the LOD now, which is simple enough to do. Just click File-> Generate LOD

 

Select Full, and it’ll generate. Give it a few minutes to generate.

 

Once that’s done, your distant meshes are complete, however if you tried it in game now the landscape would be completely pink since you haven’t yet generated the textures. This is where a separate program comes into use, TES4qLOD, by Lightwave.

 

This excellent and powerful program can generate the textures in seconds, doesn’t have the black texture or naming bug, and is simple to use. Get it here.

 

Once it’s done, use the command prompt and specify the following (where MyWorldspaceID is the ID of you worldspace, and MyMod.esp the name of your plugin file):

 

tes4qlod -f MyWorldspaceID MyMod.esp

 

And press enter. It will generate, and clean up the partials for you.

 

NOTE: When typing the command, the program IS CASE SENSETIVE, so type the ID's exactly as they should appear or else you'll encounter problems.

 

When that’s done, you’re almost ready to check out your landscape, however one last thing to note is your load order. Make sure your mod for the moment is in the mod index 01 (loaded after Oblivion.esm) for the LOD to work. If you see no distant land, it’s probably your load order. When that’s ready, and you’re running only Oblivion and your mod for the time being, test it and enjoy your lovely landscape with LOD!

 

Click

 

Hopefully I didn't miss anything, and I hope this proves useful. xD

[Vagrant0]

Just wanted to add, that if you have any other .esm files loaded, those will take the first spots in your loading order no matter how you have them setup in OBMM.

One solution is to load your mod as close as you can to the beginning of the load order, find a static which was placed as part of the mod, select it with console open, and remember the number at the front of the reference. This number is the offset you need to generate your LOD data with. If you load the mod in the CS with that number (minus 1) also loaded (don't save the mod) you can then generate the LOD data with the correct ID linkage (don't save the mod). From there just exit the CS, do not save the mod with all those others loaded or else it will screw up your mod, the LOD data is stored outside the mod, so you don't need to save anything.

 

Generating LOD data should really be the last thing you intend to do with that mod since every time you make a change to the mod, the loading order will be changed, or the LOD data may no longer be current.

[Dave_91]

Yep. Thanks for pointing that out. :) Good thing about this though, is that instead of using the incredibly buggy CS distant texture generator, you can save lots of time and effort using TES4qLOD by Lightwave. You can also specify different sizes of the distant textures too, so you can make them higher or lower res depending and what quality you're looking for, and your setup.

 

I've seen a lot of people over the past having trouble with it, at first it does seem confusing, I could never get it working. When I did I got the evil half black texture bug, and the only way around that, is to tediously fix each texture file through a seperate program, and depending on your landmass size, it could take hours to fix.

 

Generating LOD data should really be the last thing you intend to do with that mod since every time you make a change to the mod, the loading order will be changed, or the LOD data may no longer be current.

 

Yeah I find that annoying. I tend to fiddle around with the LOD generator a lot before I moving on to region generation, to get the landmass as close to how I wanted it as possible, which sometimes takes a fair few tries in game beforehand. If you've a long list of mods, it can be irritating messing with load orders, thank god for the 'Move to top/bottom' feature in OMM.